Chapter 4. Building the Team: Tasks, People, and Relationships

The first rule of teamwork at SEI, the money management firm headquartered in Oaks, Pennsylvania, is that there are remarkably few rules. Teams have anywhere from 2 to 30 members and every team is structured differently. Most employees belong to one “base team” as well as three or four ad hoc teams. These ad hoc teams give SEI a sense of perpetual motion. Work is distributed among roughly 140 self-managing teams. Some are permanent, designed to serve big customers or important markets. But many are temporary: People come together to solve a problem and disband when their work is done. The result is a workplace that is always on the move. “We call it fluid leadership,” says SEI's ...

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